THE TASK FORCE THAT LED CANADA IN ITS ROCKY EFFORT TO PROCURE COVID-19 VACCINES SHOULD BE REVAMPED OR DISBANDED, EXPERT WITNESSES ARGUED TUESDAY IN A DISSECTION OF CANADA'S VACCINE `DISASTER.'
Back domestic industry, hears committee
OTTAWA • Liberal and Conservative MPs attempted to lay blame for Canada’s lack of vaccine production at each other’s feet Tuesday, while expert witnesses said the problem is a lack of support for scientific research and production across decades.
MPs on the House of Commons industry committee were meeting to address Canada’s lack of domestic vaccine capacity. The country’s vaccine rollout has been sluggish so far, as international shipments have been regularly delayed and Canada has fallen behind other countries.
After hearing opening statements from researchers and industry executives, Conservative MP Pierre Paul-Hus said the current government had been incompetent in procuring vaccines and asked where the Liberals had failed.
However, Ken Hughes, chair of the board of Providence Therapeutics, said the problems in Canada’s pharmaceutical industry go back across several governments.
“I would not say that this is the failing of one government. This is the failing of Canada and our ability to focus and develop capacity over many decades,” he said.
Providence is a Canadian firm developing its own COVID-19 vaccine. Hughes, a former MP and Alberta cabinet minister, argued there should be greater support for homegrown pharmaceutical firms to ensure Canada isn’t reliant on multinational companies.
“We won’t do it just by inviting in branch plants of foreign companies. We do it by building up the domestic talent we have here already.”
Liberal MP Ali Ehsassi listed several pharmaceutical companies that had closed or reduced their Canadian operations during the Harper government and suggested they had failed to appreciate the benefit of investing in pharmaceutical companies.
Joel Lexchin, a public health professor and emergency room doctor in Toronto, said in his opening remarks that the sale of Connaught Laboratories, a publicly owned Canadian medical research and manufacturing facility, during the Brian Mulroney government was a major setback, but said there was much fault to go around.
“I don’t think that it was just the Conservative government that is to blame for this. When the Chrétien government took power in 1993, they did not engage in any investment.”
He said that lack of investment continued in the Harper and Trudeau years and generally Canadian governments have not been able to look far down the road to the problems ahead.
“I don’t think that we can blame this on any one government. I think that it’s been a failure to look at things in a future sense and take action,” he said. “We’ve ignored warnings and we don’t have any domestic capability to make COVID vaccine as a result.”
Lexchin told MPs that Canada should pay for a publicly owned vaccine manufacturing facility, giving the country something that could not be purchased by an international pharmaceutical company.
He also said the government should drastically increase its investments in health research.
“Right now in Canada, invest about a billion dollars a year in medical research. Compare that to what happens in the United States, 10 times the population, but the National Institutes of Health invests $40 billion, so four times as much per capita, as Canada.”
Volker Gerdts, the director and chief executive officer of VIDO-InterVac in Saskatoon, said Canada has to be ready before a virus hits and not leap to react afterwards.
“We need to have these departments in the country that are able to tackle immediately emerging diseases,” he said.
VIDO-InterVac received $46 million from the government to set up a manufacturing facility. It already has labs built to allow researchers to safely work with deadly viruses and Gerdts said they hope to encourage the government to invest more so they can have a standing capacity to deal with new diseases.
He said it is not something you can simply ramp up overnight.
“It takes about five months to get a person fully comfortable to work in a high-containment lab with a potentially deadly virus. And so you don’t want to, when a disease emerges, start to recruit new people, you have to have them ready.”
Brad Sorenson, president and CEO of Providence, said his company will be able to deliver vaccines, using the same technology from Pfizer and Moderna, by the end of this year.
“In 2021, Providence will manufacture and sell vaccines directly to Canada’s provinces. It will build out manufacturing capacity covering the entire value chain of messenger RNA vaccine production from the earliest raw material to the final formulation,” he said.
Providence announced a deal directly with the Manitoba government last week for two million doses of the company’s vaccine, which are still in the first stages of clinical trials.
Sorenson said the government had been slow and not responsive to his early requests for support, but also later said they had provided commitments of $4.7 million to advance clinical trials and another $5 million for manufacturing.
Sorenson said his frustration with the government is they haven’t adapted quickly as new information about the efficacy of vaccines came to the forefront.
“My frustration is that as data rolled in, as we saw, technologies that were effective, I didn’t see any, any adaptations to that additional knowledge,” he said. “No government had the experience of dealing with pandemic prior to this. But the question is, what are we going to do with the information that we have now?”
THIS IS THE FAILING OF CANADA AND OUR ABILITY TO FOCUS AND DEVELOP CAPACITY OVER DECADES